Nietzschean Autonomy and the Meaning of the “Sovereign Individual”*

Abstract

This paper has two goals, one narrower and one wider. The limited goal is to address an interpretive dispute over the Genealogy’s description of the “sovereign individual,” a character type whose features bear on Nietzsche’s distinctive conceptions of conscience, promising, and what it is to take responsibility for oneself. The wider goal is to characterize Nietzschean autonomy. The basic idea is that the meaning of the sovereign individual emerges clearly in light of a distinction from Bernard Williams between two senses of responsibility—one tied to voluntary action, the other to an ambitious conception of responsible agency. What we learn from Williams about responsibility then illuminates Nietzschean autonomy, which is understood as a matter of overcoming psychological weakness by unifying the self.